As the workforce continues to collaborate among many diverse locations, certain electronic communications mediums and utilities have become an integral part of the communications tools of the workforce. One such tool is Instant Messaging (IM).
The current taxonomy of IM conversations is by user. For example, Mary initiates a conversation with Joe, and both ends of this IM conversation have the same context. The entire Mary-Joe conversation, regardless of subject or subjects, is shown on both Mary and Joe's IM windows.
Unfortunately, the sequential nature of the existing Instant Messaging art tends to simply append the most recent dialogue into the scrolling window, whatever the most recent topic of discussion might have been. For instance, someone may be carrying on a series of ongoing conversations with a peer which includes a sequence of several independent unrelated subjects (e.g. Subject A (business), Subject B (personal), Subject C (business confidential)). The contents of the Subject A (business) discussion, which was followed by a discussion of Subject B (personal), will appear in the dialogue window, when the IM dialogue window is reopened.
Over a period of time, discussion is continued between the two peers and all subjects are merged within the same IM dialogue window, inherently, with the last topic discussed appearing within the viewable dialogue re-display window. In this example, the dialogue content of Subject B (personal) is shown, whether or not that is desired.
This classic problem proves to be awkward when, for instance, an individual is asked to IM someone in a public setting. Inevitably, the remnants of prior dialogues will appear in plain view, regardless of being of a personal or private nature.
Another classic problem surfaces when it is desirable to capture specific topics from within the ongoing Instant Message dialogue transcript. Complications arise when many topics are threaded serially within one comprehensive Instant Message transcript. Typically, topic specific discussions are often woven through the entire dialogue and need to be tediously located, extracted, and reconstituted into a separate composite transcript, using standard utilities. This problem becomes especially more pronounced as IM clients commonly record and catalog transcripts of IM sessions, which may represent hours or days of dialogue, with no topic awareness.